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Return trip to Nirvana – Arthur Koestler

It is well known that the mental attitude, the mood in which one enters the gates of mushroomland,  plays a decisive part in determining the nature of the experience. Since Dr. P. was such a pleasant person and the atmosphere of Ann Arbor appealed to me, I volunteered as a guinea pig, though I felt a little guilty towards my enthusiastic friend in Harvard.  However, on the day before I took the drug, I had a very unpleasant experience  - with the result that I faced the mushrooms in an anxious and depressed state.

They come synthesized, in the shape of little pink pills.  I swallowed nine of them (18 mg. of psilocybin), which is a fair-sized dose for a person of my weight.  They were supposed to start acting after thirty minutes.  However, for nearly an hour nothing at all happened. I was chatting with Dr. P. and one of his assistants, first in his office, then in a room which had a comfortable couch in it and a tape recorder;  after a while I was left alone in the room, but Dr. P. looked in from time to time. I lay down on the couch, and soon began to experience the kind of phenomena which have been repeatedly described by people who experimented with mescalin.

When I closed my eyes I saw luminous, moving patterns of great beauty, which was highly enjoyable; then the patterns changed into planaria - a kind of flat-worm which I had watched under the microscope the previous day in a laboratory; but the worms had a tendency to change into dragons, which was less enjoyable, so I walked out of the show by opening my eyes.

I tried it again, directing the beam of the table-lamp, which had a strong bulb, straight at my closed eye- lids, and the effect was quite spectacular-rather like the explosive paintings of schizophrenics, or Walt Disney's Fantasia.

A flaming eddy, the funnel of a tornado, appeared over my head, drawing me upward; with a little auto-suggestion and self-dramatisation I could have called it a vision of myself as the prophet Elijah being taken to Heaven by a whirlwind.  But I felt that this was buying one's visions on the cheap (Carter's mushrooms are the best; mystic experience guaranteed or money refunded); so I again walked out of the show by forcing my eyes to open. It was as simple as that, and I congratulated myself on my sober self-control, a rational mind not to be fooled by little pills.

By now, however, even with open eyes, the room looked different. The colours had become not only more luminous and brilliant, but different in quality from any colour previously seen; they were located outside the normally visible spectrum, and to refer to them one would have to invent new words - so I  shall say that the walls were breen, the curtain darsh, and the sky outside emerdine. Also, one of the walls had acquired a concave bend like the inside of a barrel, the plaster statue of the Venus of Milo had acquired a grin, and the straight dado-line was pleasantly curved, which struck me as an exceedingly clever joke.

But all this was quite unlike the wobbling world of drunkenness, for the room was plunged into an underwater silence, where the faint hum of the tape recorder became obtrusively loud, and the almost imperceptible undulations of the curtains became the Ballet of the Flowing Folds (the undulations were caused by the warm air ascending from the central heating body).

A narrow strip of the revolving spool of the tape recorder caught the gleam of the lamp every few seconds; and this faint, intermittent spark, unnoticed before, observed out of the corner of the eye on the visual periphery, became the revolving beam of a miniature lighthouse. This Iowering of the sensory threshold and simultaneous heightening of the intensity and emotional significance of perceptions, is one of the basic phenomena of the mushroom universe. The intermittent light-signal from the slowly revolving spool became important, meaningful and mysterious; it had some secret message. Afterwards I remembered, with sympathetic understanding, the fantasies of paranoiacs about hidden electric machines and other contraptions planted by their enemies to produce evil Rays and lnfluences.

 …Dr. P. came into the room, and a minute or two later I saw the light and realised what a fool I had been to let myself be trapped by his cunning machinations. For during that minute or two he had undergone an unbelievable transformation………….

It started with the colour of his face, which had become a sickly yellow. He stood in a corner of the room with his back to the green wall, and as I stared at him his face split into two, like a cell dividing, then reunited again, but by this time the transformation was complete. A small scar on the doctor's neck which I had not noticed before, was gaping wide, trying to ingest the flesh of the chin; one ear had shrunk, the other had grown by several inches; the face became a smirking, evil phantasm.

Then it changed again, into a different kind of Hogarthian vision, and these transformations went on for what I imagined to be several minutes.

All this time the doctor's body remained unchanged; the hallucinations were confined to the space from the neck upward; and they were strangely two-dimensional, like faces cut out of cardboard. The  phenomenon was always strongest in that corner of the room where it had first occurred, and faded into less offensive distorting-mirror effects when we moved elsewhere, although the lighting of the room was uniform.

As the last remark indicates, I was still in control of my outward behaviour, and this remained true throughout the whole three or four hours of the experience. But at the same time I had completely lost control over my perception of the world. I made repeated efforts "to walk out of the show" as I had been able to do during the first stages on the couch, but I was powerless against the delusions. I kept  repeating to myself: But these are nice, friendly people, they are your friends, and so on. It had no effect whatsoever on the spontaneous and inexorable visual transformations.

I have mentioned before that all of Dr. P.'s previous subjects had positive euphoric experiences; I "broke the series," as he ruefully remarked over post-mortem drinks.

I had met the mushroom in the wrong state of mind, owing to that incident on the previous day, which had awakened memories of past experiences as a political prisoner, and of past preoccupations with brain-washing, torture and the extraction of confessions.  The phantom faces were obvious projections of a deep seated resentment against being "trapped" in a situation which carried symbolic echoes of the relation between prisoner and inquisitor, of Gestapo and GPU.

Poor Dr. P. and his nice colleagues had to endure what they would call a "negative transference," and serve as projection screens for the lantern slides of the past, stored in the mental underground.  Thus I was a rather unfortunate choice for a guinea pig - except perhaps to demonstrate what mushroomland can do to the wrong kind of guinea pig;  and I suspect that a sizable minority of people who try for a  chemical lift to Heaven, will find themselves landed in the other place.